Technological advances over the last decades have significantly increased the convenience to customers when purchasing groceries and other goods. For example, customers now have the possibility, in a large number or even in the majority of cases, of accessing websites hosted by suppliers of goods and services and of studying offers and product information online. Further, customers can, in some cases, even order food and beverages on the website of a supermarket and request a home delivery on a particular day.
More generally, the ordering and home delivery has the advantage of simplifying the supply of products to households, because a single vehicle of a delivery company may deliver large quantities of products and access a large number of households. This avoids having a large number of households participating in traffic as individuals, as many customers would otherwise drive back and forth between various stores (such as supermarkets) and shop individually. To summarize, one may conclude that this de-individualizing of the consumer traffic associated with transportation of consumer goods may be a way to promote environmental-friendliness of our societies.
For some customer groups (for example, for the elderly), having to find the right website to order or re-order desired products and of finding the right menus for doing so on a website, etc., may be a cumbersome task. In addition, repeatedly performing such tasks may annoy customers, and some customers thus tend to fall back into a routine of driving around and exploring stores instead of engaging in more progressive forms of purchasing behavior involving the use of more recent technology. There are thus concerns remaining with respect to environment-friendliness of a customer's good purchasing habits and also with respect to convenience for the customers.
With the aforementioned advantages, come also particular types of concerns such as security issues. When customers shop via the internet and enter credit card information, the possibility exists that sensitive data is stolen and potentially abused. This means that data security is an increasingly important aspect to always be taken into account in this context as well. As an illustrative example, reference is made to so-called dash devices, which are used to conveniently order (or reorder) products in a particularly easy way. A dash device is a WiFi compatible device that is typically equipped with just a single button that allows directly ordering products via the internet by pressing the button. While such a dash device may improve convenience, in particular, for some customer groups, it also raises security concerns.
There is, hence, a need for technological advances suited to address one or more of the above-mentioned shortcomings.